Venedikt Erofeev’s 'Walpurgis Night' is out in a translation by Marian Schwartz

The only play by Venedikt Erofeev, author of the epic “Moscow to the End of the Line,” offers a terrifying look at Soviet reality from behind the doors of a mental asylum. Alluding to greats from Shakespeare to Pushkin, Erofeev creates a mesmerizing vision of a philosophical dispute in the face of death.

It’s hard
to imagine a much bleaker play than Venedikt Erofeev’s “Walpurgis Night.”
Alcoholic Lev Gurevich is admitted to a Soviet psychiatric hospital, where the
patients are abused. He seduces a nurse, steals some alcohol and the patients
celebrate, only to find they have actually drunk poisonous wood spirit
(methanol), indistinguishable from ethanol, and suffer a final, fatal
liberation.

This is
the simple story behind Erofeev’s extraordinary five-act tragedy that is by
turns comic and macabre, shocking and satirical. The play is now available in a
brand new version by Marian Schwartz, translated with her usual virtuoso
mastery of postmodern stylistics.

In 1969
Erofeev wrote a novel about a drunken intellectual riding a commuter train from
Moscow towards Petushki. Variously translated as “Moscow to the End of the
Line,” “Moscow-Petushki” or “Moscow Stations,” this stream-of-consciousness
existential symphony, unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1989, secured the
writer’s reputation. In this “prose poem”, Erofeev wove a tapestry of literary
references, contrasting registers and philosophical digressions.

“Walpurgis
Night,” Erofeev’s only play, was first published abroad in 1985. There is the
same rich allusive patchwork, with references to everything from the Bible to
Pushkin’s retelling of Don Juan in “The Stone Guest” (it is also important to
know that “Walpurgis Night” was alternatively titled “Steps of the Commander”
by the author – a clear reference to Pushkin’s play). Walpurgis Night is May
Day Eve, as Gurevich tells the other patients: “Since the eighth century, this
night has always been marked by something terrifying and wonderworking.”

Ward 3,
where Gurevich ends up, like Chekhov’s “Ward 6” (also a mental asylum), is a
place where the boundaries between madness and sanity are blurred. The
patients, like those in Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward,” symbolize different
outlooks. Gurevich’s incarcerated companions include an ideologue, an idealist,
a melancholy romantic and a satanic sexual mystic. Erofeev’s drama has
disturbing undercurrents of maniacal music and of sadism, from nurses spitting
in patients’ faces to nightmarish spurting syringes.

All
the world's a stage

Gurevich
often talks in verse; one of the doctors complains about his “Shakespearean
iambs” and tells him ironically: “You’re … not on stage.” Many of the lines are
neither pentameters nor especially iambic, but closer to the portentous,
cryptic doggerel of King Lear’s fool, suiting Gurevich’s character as a lord of
misrule.

One of
the most interesting aspects of Erofeev’s work – and most challenging for the translator – is his
linguistic variety. When the doctor tells Gurevich that drinking is bad for
him, Gurevich replies that’s like telling Othello, when he’s just killed his
wife “that crushing a windpipe and trachea can lead to … asphyxiation.” At the
other end of the spectrum, the hospital’s parrot (who in pythonesque fashion
ends up dead) simply repeats: “Get to work, work, work. Go get fucked, fucked,
fucked.”

The
play’s complex and interlocking themes range from anti Semitism to the
metaphysical nature of time. Above all, “Walpurgis Night” is a compelling
commentary on the Soviet condition: “I’ve / Worn a straitjacket since I was
born,” says Gurevich.